This article sketches out the implications for moral development theory, axiology and moral education of Dabrowski's theory of Positive Disintegration. Dabrowski's idea of the necessity of lower level disintegration before integration can take place on higher levels is explored, as is his central and unique contribution of the concept of multilevelness of behavioural organization and functions, particularly the importance given to emotional development as the source of objective valuing. A basic assumption is that there is an emprically observable development of (...) the capacity to make value judgements and the ability to establish one's own hierarchy of values independent from cultural conditioning. Dabrowski's insights rescue moral theory from much of its confusion and root it in the vital, existential, whole person. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 44–55. Philosophers are sperm, poetry erupts sperm and dribbles, philosopher recodes term, to terminate, —A. Staley Groves 1 There is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately described as “overnaming”—the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness. Overnaming as the linguistic being of melancholy points to another curious relation of language: the overprecision that obtains in the tragic (...) relationship between the languages of human speakers. —Walter Benjamin 2 Prologue. Any text with an inflection of the word “thesis” in its title risks closing the borders of what is posited in it. However, perhaps it would be possible to think this act of defining in a way that is less, so to say, definitive. I would like to recall the opening line of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione , a constellation of theses, if anything. “First it needs to be posited [ thesthai ] what a noun and what a verb [is].” 3 Upon closer inspection, the definitions of the noun ( onoma ) and verb ( rh?ma ) do not at all appeal to any notion of strictly bordering-off, but are merely captured in a movement toward definition, establishing their own horizons. 4 It is therefore not a coincidence that Aristotle deploys the aorist medio-passive infinitive thesthai to describe this process. It is an infinite, self-instigating movement without proper horizon or telos . 5 It is this sense of thesis in relation to the basic components of language that I will attempt—perhaps in what may prove to be a gesture of what Walter Benjamin called “overnaming” 6 —to posit as cumposition , the composition of philosophical discourse that is conscious of the abyss of language in which it moves. 7 1. In her essay “When Philosophy Meant the Love of Wisdom,” Avital Ronell evokes the following question: What if philosophy’s love for wisdom has gone bad? The perversity of philosophy’s love not only appears in its recursiveness as the love of love for wisdom, first presented in Plato’s Symposium , but also “in all its brutality, especially when it’s set against literature and poetry.” 8 Philosophy’s love is a brutal one, perverse. Indeed, Immanuel Kant famously described the scene of metaphysics as a ‘battleground of … endless controversies,” 9 and “destined for exercising its forces in mock combat, and upon which no combatant has ever been able to gain even the least ground for himself by fighting.” 10 Because of the many modalities of love from the onset of philosophy onwards, Ronell signals the difficulty of addressing in any universal way the question of love in philosophy, unless she would consider it “in its essentially sado-masochistic dimension.” 11 As Heidegger already remarked parenthetically in his Introduction to Metaphysics , polemos as war and confrontation is the same as the logos . 12 Philosophy has always been a polemical discourse. 2. At the same moment, however untimely this moment may be, love has been conspicuously absent from Heidegger’s work. Nevertheless, Giorgio Agamben has been able to tease out Dasein’s love as a “passion of facticity.” 13 Agamben develops from out of Heidegger’s war-struck logos the following definition of love, which will allows to proceed to a reading of the origin of philosophy itself as the love of wisdom, a relation that in itself may hide “a kind of original fetishism.” 14 What man introduces into the world, his “proper,” is not simply the light and opening of knowledge but above all the opening to concealment and opacity. Al?theia , truth, is the safeguard of l?th? , nontruth; […] Love is the passion of facticity in which man bears this nonbelonging and darkness, appropriating ( adsuefacit [ ereignet ]) them while safeguarding them as such. Love is thus not, as the dialectic of desire suggests, the affirmation of the self in the negation of the loved object; it is, instead, the passion and exposition of facticity itself and of the irreducible impropriety of being. In love, the lover and the beloved come to light in their concealment, in an eternal facticity beyond Being . 15 Truth as al?theia , “unhiddenness” or “unconcealment,” which has in recent times again gained a special prominence in certain regions of philosophical discourse, is thus the ultimate expression of Dasein’s love, even if, for the philosopher, the beloved is love itself. 3. In Plato’s Symposium , Socrates famously introduces the philosopher as a figure in love with wisdom. But also Love himself is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom; he is an interpreter ( herm?neuon ), 16 a hermeneutic, a messenger between the gods and men. He organises all intercourse and dialectic interaction between them. 17 Plato’s definition starts with Socrates invoking Diotima of Mantineia, who had instructed him in eroticism. 18 Diotima inseminated Socrates with the seeds of philosophy, taught him how to love. We can imagine young Socrates paying his first visit to her, seeking affection and pleasure in her maternal body. “What then,” we hear Socrates asking, “may love be?” And here we find Diotima answering his call: “the love of the good is always to its own [ aut?i einai aei ].” Socrates answers: “that is the very truth [ al?thestata ],” 19 or, as Heidegger would translate it, “the most unhidden.” 20 So already in this primal scene of philosophy’s love we find the intimate relation between love and unconcealment. 4. If Love is a philosopher who practices the love of the good as the highest truth, an abyss opens: what is the truth of philosophy itself? Necessarily, this must be a truth outside the logic of (un)concealment, outside the logic of the Ereignis or the event, if it doesn’t want to fall into an infinite regress. Some have argued that there is no such thing as philosophical truth, yet this truth has appeared, albeit marginally, in another discussion of love, as the etumos logos , true discourse. 21 This was already pointed at by Michel Foucault, 22 and later commented upon by Christopher Fynsk: “the exigencies to which Foucault answered in seeking his 'truth,' [ etumos ] […] are linked to an exigency met in any consequent meditation on the essence of language.” 23 Any consequent meditation on the essence of language, perhaps a meditation as it takes place within philosophy on its own language, will have to arrive at a certain truth, even when as unstable, incoherent, and assaulting the borders of finitude as etymology may be. Etymology is the truth of philosophical discourse. 5. Our meditation on the relations between philosophy, love and truth means in no way to move toward a philosophy which would take “Desire” as its transcendental signified, distributing different desires for truth through different discourse levels, nor discard it as an extra-philosophical affect. A position such as would be assumed by any philosophy of desire is ferociously attacked by Jean-François Lyotard in his book Libidinal Economy , but in doing so he hits upon a—for him despicable—condition of the philosopher, the one who is “nothing but thought,” the one with whom we tend to sympathise; the condition of the “as if.” This is philosophy’s meta-ontological mask. Philosophy’s love is the love of the as if: “[A]nd so, to be, I have only to place myself as well in the circumference, turn with the intensities, act as if I loved, suffered, laughed, ran, fucked, slept, shat, and pissed, I, thought.” 24 Even though Lyotard wishes that “this supreme effort of thought die,” 25 we, in our turn and not so afraid to die, may now also perhaps define etumos as truth “as if” al?theia ; the former makes an appeal to the latter’s affect, but is not “the real thing”—or wherever the quotation marks need to take hold to stabilise our discourse. 6. Even a philosophical discourse as self-asserting and sanitised from any affective overtones as Alain Badiou’s does not escape this condition. In his work, the philosopher is a figure of circulation, someone who, at the end of the day, can only act “as if.” This typology of the philosopher is first hinted at in Being and Event , when Badiou claims that, “philosophy is not centred on ontology—which exists as a separate and exact discipline—rather it circulates between this ontology […], the modern theories of the subject and its own history.” 26 Philosophy is thus in the first place separated from ontology and therefore merely circulates along it. Beside ontology, which in Badiou’s work appears as a fully atonic axiomatization of set theory, 27 philosophy circulates through the theories of the subject, which, under the procedure of poetry, are subtractive of ontology, thus allowing for the appearance of a truth as an event ( Ereignis as the unconcealment of concealment) and subjective fidelity, and the history of philosophy itself: its discourses and the story of its limitless love of wisdom. For Badiou, the right of philosophy is the right to cite its conditions, the right to cite their truths. The text of philosophy is the text of citation. 28 The philosophical act thus is “an act of second thought.” 29 7. If, as Plato suggested, the love for the good is the highest truth, the bursting forth of this truth as event happens outside philosophy. Either as the ultimate idea that is sought or as uncounted inconsistency exploding into maximum existence, registered on philosophy’s seismographs, this truth as event remains tightly bound to a philosophical desire for truth. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem even claims that “the event […] is the ontological structure of Desire,” 30 and “Desire wants the event.” 31 Superlatively (perhaps: most truthfully), “The event has the structure of rape.” 32 Although we should place a number of question marks in the margins of Kacem’s philosophical project and his rapid conflation of multiple textual registers, he does point out a certain sedation of philosophy’s love of wisdom in Badiou’s work. However, that philosophy would be a place to house multiple truths, circulating among them, again opens us to the ‘perversity’ of this love that Ronell pointed out. Philosophy cruises truths. 8. How does philosophy’s “second thought” arrive, if ever? Philosophy’s lovely circulation through what is already presented by mathematics, theories of the subject and its own history is first conditioned by a sustained belief in the possibility of formalisation. But what if this formalisation itself is bound to fail? What if we deny formalisation, or at least point to the discomfort we experience of such forcing to formal appearance such as painstakingly described in Witold Gombrowicz’ literary oeuvre. Jacques Derrida already pointed out in reference to Husserl’s final appeal to geometry, that “the institution of geometry could only be a philosophical act.” 33 Similarly, we could criticise that the act of formalisation on which Badiou’s citational appropriation of mathematics, and therefore the circulation of philosophy, rests: “As soon as we utilize the concept of form—even if to criticize an other concept of form—we inevitably have recourse to the self-evidence of a kernel of meaning. And the medium of this self-evidence can be nothing than the language of metaphysics.” 34 At the end of the same essay Derrida sketches out the consequences this has for philosophy, which, however, strangely resonate with what Badiou proposes as philosophy’s circulation. One might think […] that formality—or formalization—is limited by the sense of Being which, in fact, throughout its entire history, has never been separated from its determination as presence, beneath the excellent surveillance of the is : and that henceforth the thinking of form has the power to extend itself the thinking of Being. But that the two limits thus denounced are the same may be what Husserl’s enterprise illustrates[.…] Thus, one probably does not have to choose between two lines of thought. Rather, one has to meditate upon the circularity which makes them pass into on another indefinitely. And also, by rigorously repeating this circle in its proper historical possibility, perhaps to let some elliptical displacement be produced in the difference of repetition: a deficient displacement, doubtless, but deficient in a way that is not yet—or no longer—absence, negativity , non-Being, lack, silence. 35 In many ways this resounds with what I have stated above. Although Badiou radically separates the “thinking of form” and the “thinking of Being” to respectively the meta-ontological/philosophical domain and the ontological/mathematical domain, the remainder within philosophy itself appears as this “ circle in its proper historical possibility.” And indeed we may have traced a “deficient displacement” which is not yet or no longer an “absence” as would be the truth subtractive to ontology: the “as if”–truth 36 of the etumos as truth in philosophy itself, the truth of philosophy as love of wisdom. 9. We may want to ask whether the two lines of thought theorised by Derrida and again separated by Badiou both exhibit this circularity. If that would be the case, this would allow us to consider their intertwinement more in depth. What Derrida calls the “thinking of Being” and Badiou refers to as “ontology” is thoroughly unbound by what is commonly referred to in an economic discourse as capitalism. The sudden insertion of a materialist trope may seem infelicitous here, however, capitalism has, as Badiou put it succinctly, also a “properly ontological virtue.” 37 The logic of capitalism, even though it operates in the “most complete barbarity,” 38 has an ontological virtue of its own, namely the destruction of the One as viable metaphysical point of departure. The “barbarity” of capitalism’s destructive character operates by “brute force,” but also sometimes by, as Walter Benjamin put it, “the most refined” 39 one. In any case, it unbinds all. As Lyotard stated in one of his seemingly unending sentences: Capital is not the denaturation of relations between man and man, nor between man and woman, is the wavering of the (imaginary?) primacy of genitality, of reproduction and sexual difference, it is the displacement of what was in place, it is the unbinding of the most inane pulsions, since money is the sole justification or bond, and money being able to justify anything, it deresponsibilizes and raves absolutely, it is the sophistics of the passions and at the same time, their energetic prosthetics; […] it has certain anti-unitary and anti-totalizing traits [...]40 Thus capital and capitalism are figures of unbinding and circulation. We find ourselves here in the metaphorical domain of philosophy that both in Lyotard and Badiou has its recourse to an economic discourse. Derrida has addressed this tendency at length in his essay “White Mythology,”41 and in a different register I will attempt to address it below, acknowledging that indeed philosophical language may be a “fund of 'forced metaphors.'”42 10. How is it that truth emerges from the ontological wasteland of capitalism, to be captured by philosophy’s love of wisdom? What is this love responding to and how is it that philosophy refuses to turn the other cheek to reality? Perhaps a beginning of an answer to this question may lie in the way in which Marx parenthetically defined capitalism: “the universal relation of utility and use” as “universal prostitution.” 43 which includes everyone: Prostitution is only a particular expression of the general prostitution of the worker, and because prostitution is a relationship which includes both the person prostituted and the person prostituting—whose baseness is even greater—thus the capitalist, too, etc. is included within this category. 44 It may prove fruitful to read general prostitution here in the logic of unbinding and circulation, following Benjamin, who speaks of an “erotology of the damned.” 45 Benjamin’s work on the German translation of Charles Baudelaire must definitely have influenced his work on the destructive character of capitalism. The tropes of prostitution and destruction already appear in his note on the poem “Destruction” from Les fleurs du mal . “The bloody apparatus of destruction,” Benjamin asks himself, where is this phrase in Baudelaire? 46 In Baudelaire’s poem, the demon of destruction takes on the “most seductive form” of women, and seduces the visitor to the “planes of Boredom,” where he is introduced to the “filthy clothes' and “open wounds” and the “bloody apparatus of Destruction.” Is it from these “planes of Boredom, profound and barren” 47 that philosophy gleans its truths. 11. If philosophy thinks ontology as prostitutional, whom does it cite? Although to some authors, it would suffice to use the indicative quality of language as such to open such an ontology, 48 we should perhaps focus here on the atonic desert where the prostitutional machinery is blithely at work as captured in the work of Pierre Guyotat. He opens up to such an interpretation when he states that his novel Tomb for Fifty Thousand Soldiers is, “in spite of everything, metaphysical; a metaphysics of history, certainly not religious; it is also a somewhat ontological.” 49 Several philosophers that I have addressed above refer to his work; for example Badiou, who refers to the “neo-classicism” of Guyotat as a resurrection of the “cosmological aim” of grand literature hearkening back to Lucretius. 50 Guyotat’s “prostitutional universe,” 51 which reduces “all vital norms to the immediate commercial potentials of the body.” 52 On the other side of the philosophical spectrum, Lyotard digs deeper, describing the actual jouissance of the worker submitted to the capitalist machinery, “the machine of the machine, fucker fucked by it.” 53 And he continues: “And let’s finally acknowledge this jouissance , which is similar […] in every way to that of prostitution, the jouissance of anonimity, the jouissance of the repetition of the same in work, […]. Jouissance is unbearable .” 54 This is what Guyotat so “admirably” expresses in his work, and is also professed by himself. The same logic as Lyotard’s clearly appears upon reading a few sentences from his seminal essay Langage du corps (Language of the body). But on reflection, what spectacle is more brutally exciting than that of a child wanking with his left hand, in this system, and writing with his right. In the resultant disarray. There must be seen one of the terms of this contradictory pulsional will, being at the same time seen and voyeur (“seeing”), pimp and whore, buyer and bought, fucker and fucked. 55 Lyotard described this—within a philosophical discourse that is—as a “superbly capitalist dispositif ,” 56 a mode of writing-masturbating in which production and consumption coincide, truly a “bloody apparatus of destruction.” This logic equally distorts the clear distance that is regularly maintained by writers—and nearly always by philosophers—toward their own work. To me, the most concise formulation of this contracted distance can be located in the neologism that Guyotat coins in his novel Prostitution: “ nhommer ,” ringing with both homme (man) and nommer (to name). For example in the otherwise “untranslatable” sentence: ma e s’renâcl’ chuya se l’mâl’ le nhomme’, lui prend la fess’ o lui frott’ la mostach. 57 Nhommer is therefore an en-hommer , an insemination of a man, life-giving and naming, as well as a n’hommer , its own negation and undoing. This is echoed by Benjamin when he says that in the Bible, “the 'Let there be' and in the words 'He named' a beginning and end of the act, the deep and clear relation of the creative act to language appears each time.” 58 Nhommer is a creative act philosophy cannot accomplish but only approach. The writer always n/mam/nes , the philosopher may only cite, at the risk of introducing prostitutional logic, the shortcuts between naming and creating, creating and exploiting the fabric of philosophy. 12. Prostitutional ontology, materially captured by the bloody, short-circuiting apparatuses of capitalism, can only be cited by philosophy, acted out, at the risk of unbinding the whole of philosophical discourse itself. The events and miracles on the atonic planes of boredom may not affect philosophy itself. This could be one of the reasons that sex and sexual difference have largely remained outside of the realm philosophy. Derrida has already done a considerable amount of work on this curious lack, especially in two essays entitled “ Geschlecht ” on Heidegger’s work and Dasein’s sexuality. In “ Geschlecht 1: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” Derrida investigates the role of sexuality in Heidegger’s definition of Dasein, and his general silence on the topics of sex and gender. “It is as if […] sexual difference did not rise to the height [ hauteur ] of ontological difference. […] But insofar as it is open to the question of Being, insofar as it has a relation to Being, in that very reference, Dasein would not be sexiferous [ sexifère ].” 59 The material that I adduced above might give us a frame in which to interpret this repression of Dasein’s sexuality in Heidegger. In philosophy, sexual difference is cited as ontological difference. Prostitution is cited as the unbinding of Being. However, the unbinding or separating force, hailed as the virtue of capitalism and eagerly imported into philosophical discourse, perhaps even brought to the “height of ontological difference,” is also always already at work in philosophy itself, be it as a separation between ontological and theological domains in Aristotle or the separation between a truth procedure and the citational dispositif of philosophy in Badiou. The truth, as Anne Dufourmentelle put it in her book on sex and philosophy, extracted from the “torture chamber” 60 of philosophy is that this separation is always already sexualized. If etymology is not the key to Bluebeard’s seventh door, it at least opens up a little skylight in the chamber of horrors. In Latin, sexus means separation. The Church Fathers to whom we owe the development of the Latin language thus anticipated by several centuries Lacan’s too famous remark: “There is no sexual relation.” 61 The truth of Lacan’s statement that “there is no sexual relation,” in the precise sense that the term “sex” derives from “separation” and vice versa is only etymologically validated within philosophy. The power of its truth only appears etymologically as philosophical truth. 13. Literature does not need to prove this point. It immediately participates in the circulatory logic of sexuation, without the need to distance itself from it through citational checkpoints and border patrols. It allows language to derange freely, as literature often reminds us of. Dufourmentelle clarifies to us once again, illustrating Guyotat’s point that I cited above. The act of writing is performative: writing and thinking are acts. What philosophy cannot tolerate is the nonresponse to which the enigma of sex refers it. No philosopher can bear up the boudoir. What philosophy does not succeed in conceptualizing is the traversal of a disaster. […] It may be that traversing the impossibility of the relation to sex is what founds philosophy. The black sun of thought about sex. Sex is what leads to traversal, to exile; it orients and disorients. From this exile, literature is born. Literature is the other, hidden guest at this blind date in the boudoir. 62 In her introduction to Dufourmentelle’s book, Ronell even goes as far as suggesting that certain regions of philosophy may be coinciding with the realm of “obliterature,” a space of thought’s disavowal of sex. 63 Indeed, sex induces in philosophy an anti-Platonic “black sun of thought,” that is, following Julia Kristeva, melancholy, when the words don’t come: “Recall the speech of the depressed: repetitive and monotonous. Within the impossibility to link up, the phrase interrupts itself, depletes, halts.” 64 To refer ourselves to Aristotle’s first thoughts on properly philosophical language with which we opened this text, for Aristotle the mind suddenly “halts” the moment it hears a noun or verb that is not well inflected, not properly disseminated into language. 65 Already the minimum of grammatical failure is enough for the philosopher to fall into a stupor. The unworking of grammar is the melancholic condition of philosophy. 14. We need to find the language in which philosophy writes, a writing that organises the “ elliptical displacement” of philosophy blindly circulating through its conditions, perhaps even a “language of decentering, or a dispositif of acephalic writing.” 66 But as Ronell has brilliantly argued in her reading of Freud’s case of the Rat Man, “The Sujet suppositaire ,” the circulation of philosophy should always be read through a lexicon of intervention and insemination which she calls an “Oedipedagogy,” 67 a mode of obsessional neurotic thinking, that is, a mode of cir- cul -ation: around the arse, around the riddles of the sphincter. 68 As a mode of what Ronell calls with Freud the “obsessional neurotic style,” a style of punning, the cir- cul -ation of philosophy rests on paronomasia, that is, the domain of paronomy and etymology. This is however not without scandal. In some circles of truth’s closure, pun has remained the name of an indictment, an accusatory identification of that which takes too much pleasure, disarranging academic languages, promoting a rhetoric of looseness within the parameters of a recreational linguistics, valuelessly succumbing to the most indefensible copulations of meaning, related […] to the temporal succession of shame over pleasure, incriminating the grammar of some strict order of things, and so forth. 69 That punning and its avatars of paronomasia and etymology are already present in one of the most philosophical grammars of a “strict order of things” provides us with a clue that in composition of philosophical language itself, something may be “indefensibly copulating.” 15. In the opening paragraph of Aristotle’s Categories , otherwise a work of remarkable philosophical rigour and properly purged language, we may track down the “elliptical displacement” or “acephalic writing” of philosophy. This is not to be found in the first two semantic relations described by Aristotle—homonymy and synonymy, or the grand metaphysical concepts equivocity and univocity—but in the third one, largely neglected in the corpus of occidental philosophical discourse, or so it seems. This relation, or perhaps more felicitous, movement in language, is called paronymy , and is defined as follows: “Paronymous are called those which, differing from something through case, have an appellation according to the name [of those], like 'grammarian' [ grammatikos ] from 'grammar' [ grammatik?s ] and 'courageous-man' [ andreios ] from 'courageous' [ andreias ].” 70 Paronymy, which is regulated through case ( pt?sis ), the way in which words fall into a sentence, is addressed to the form of the word, the manner of its signification, and not its meaning. 71 Case is also the driving force behind ontological differentiation, regulating the formal aspects of Being falling into beings. What is regulated by case in philosophy is regulated by the supposedly unrestrained punning and paronomasia in the process of sexual differentiation. Paronymy and case offer philosophy a window to peek into modes of discourse it does not like to associate itself with. But at the same time, philosophy is already contaminated by paronymy, which introduces the problematic of formalisation itself, the form of the name and of language at the heart of many metaphysical issues. The glorious theories of accident and substance, subject and object, Being and beings, and so on, cannot be inserted in the philosophical discourse without the lubricant of paronymy. 16. Paronymy, moving from form to form, is not without its methodology. Aristotle’s logic of the paradigm closely mimics the movement of case, neither from particular to universal, nor from universal to particular, but from particular to particular. 72 We are confronted here with what Agamben calls a “paradoxical type of movement,” 73 a movement that moves along itself and away from the doxa , the rule, and which should only be deployed when other means of deductive of syllogistic reasoning are no longer available. The paradigm signifies an insufficiency of properly philosophical thought. It should therefore not surprise us that the paradigm finds its modern inflection in what Lacan calls the “signifying chain,” where “no signification can be sustained except by reference to another signification.” 74 Metaphor is here the name for “the effect of the substitution of one signifier for another in the chain, nothing natural predestining the signifier for this function of phoros apart from the fact that two signifiers are involved, which can, as such, be reduced to a phonemic opposition,” 75 whereas at same time it is the “sole serious reality for man.” 76 It is here that Lacan explicitly chooses the reality of the etumos , the material cause of psychoanalysis, over the revelation al?theia . We might therefore interpret psychoanalysis as the only inflection of philosophy that insists on etumos as the sole source of truth. 17. If it the case, again according to our teacher Aristotle, that all meaningful philosophical discourse is essentially composed in an organised manner, we may insert in the composition of that word itself, in its philosophical circulation, a foreign element. Perhaps this also means that I insert myself in a lineage of paranoia and obsessional neurosis, but then again, as Guy Hocquenghem remarked, homosexuality itself is commonly associated with paranoid persecution mania, 77 “the apparition of the word curiously drives a cascade of lapses, or at least of the interpretation of common words as lapses. There is no innocent or objective position toward homosexuality, there are no situations of desire in which homosexuality doesn’t play a role.” 78 So why would I pretend otherwise? As Ronell adds, and I should have warned you before, “neologisms are much more common in persecution mania patients than in others.” 79 In recognition of what composes philosophy always remains in circulation, no matter whether approached from an “ontological” or “linguistic” perspective, no matter how “meta” the separation machinery drives us, it is circulation itself that justifies the term, if it is one, cumposition . In naming the decentering force of philosophical discourse thus, I not only intend to stress the “with” ( cum ) of the philosophical sum-plok? or com-positio , that is present in it already since Plato, 80 but also the position of philosophy itself, whenever it will have arrived or cum, shooting for the stars of wisdom on the metaphysical firmament. NOTES 1. A. Staley Groves, Poetry Vocare (The Hague/Tirana: Uitgeverij, 2011), 86. 2.Walter Benjamin, “On Language As Such and the Language of Man.” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Select Writings. vol. 1, 1913-1926 , eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 73. 3.Arist. DI 16a1. 4.If only because already the translational issues with these two words are in themselves breaching the constraints of sound definition. 5.Giorgio Agamben’s work has focused extensively on this mode, see for example Potentialities , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 234-5. 6.Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language As Such…,’ 73. 7.This is not to say that philosophy only resides in certain language games, as Wittgenstein would have it, but that negotiating the limits of those games—which, etymologically speaking, already carries in it the “com-” of philosophy’s “composition” as the morpheme “ga-,” cf. Gothic gaman , ‘participation’ or ‘communion’—determines to a large extent how much liberty philosophy is willing to grant itself in placing certain truths inside or outside its domains. 8.Avital Ronell, Fighting Theory , trans. Catherine Porter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 1. 9.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , trans./eds Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 99 (Aviii). 10.Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics , trans./ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 143 (Bxv). Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 109 (Bxv). 11.Ronell, Fighting Theory , 2. 12.Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press), 65. 13.Giorgio Agamben, “The Passion of Facticity,”in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, 202. 14.Ibid. 196. 15.Ibid. 203-4. 16.Plat. Sym . 202e. 17.Plat. Sym . 203a. Philosophy as the love of wisdom is therefore recursively defined. Here we could perhaps trace one of the origins of philosophy’s auto-immunity that Ronell has commented upon on several occasions. She signals the so-called “end of philosophy” as one of the tropes characterizing the developing auto-immunity in the body of philosophy, and while at the same distancing herself from this trope she insists that we “continue to interrogate the figures used to designate the end, and to recognize the difference among such terms as closure, finality, terminus.” (Ronell, Fighting Theory , 3) 18.Plat. Sym . 201d. 19.Ibid. 206a. 20.Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth , trans. Ted Sader (New York: Continuum, 2002), 48. 21.Plat. Phaed . 244a. 22.Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2 , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 235. 23.Christopher Fynsk, The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 65. 24.Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (New York: Continuum, 2004), 13. 25.Ibid. 13. 26.Alain Badiou, Being and Event , trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006), 3. 27.That is, the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatization, explicitly including the axiom of separation which does not allow for any inconsistent multiplicity, i.e. the appearance of the event. Nevertheless, ever since Richard Montague’s dissertation Contributions to the Axiomatic Foundations of Set Theory (Berkeley: University of California, 1957), we know that set theory can never be finitely axiomatized. 28.Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and John Van Houdt, “Circulating Philosophy: A Note on Two Apparent Misquotations in Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds,” Theory and Event 14.2 (2011). 29.Alain Badiou, Conditions , trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2008), 290, fn. 4. 30.Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Événement et répétition (Auch: Tristram, 2004), 208. 31.Ibid. 209. 32.Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, L’affect (Auch: Tristram, 2004), 93. 33.Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Symmetry’: An Introduction , trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 127. 34.Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 157. 35.Derrida, Ibid. 172-3. 36.Or, if you like, the “false truth.” See for an indictment of etymology along these lines Jean Paulhan, La preuve par l’étymologie (Paris: Minuit, 1953). 37.Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy , trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 57. 38.Ibid. 57. 39.Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” Selected Writings, Vol. II.2, 1931-1934 , trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 541-2. 40.Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 135. 41.“In signifying the metaphorical process, the paradigms of coin, of metal, silver and gold, have imposed themselves with remarkable insistence. Before metaphor—and effect of language—could find its metaphor in an economic effect, a more general analogy had to organize the exchanges between the two 'regions.'’ Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1982, 216. 42.Ibid. 257. 43.“The exchangeability of all products, activities and relations with a third, objective entity which can be re-exchanged for everything without distinction—that is, the development of exchange values (and of money relations) is identical with universal venality, corruption. Universal prostitution appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal talents, capacities, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relation of utility and use.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy , trans. Martin Nicolaus, New York: Random House, 1973, 163. 44.Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” Karl Marx Selected Writings , ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 90. 45.Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 347. 46.Ibid. 256. 47.Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal , (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1999), 161. 48.For example, Jean Pierre Brisset, Le grammaire logique, suivi de La science de Dieu . Paris: Tchou, 1970, pp. 155ff. But we could equally point to the work of Jacques Lacan or refer to the intimacies between sexual and ontological differentiation as investigated by Jacques Derrida. 49.Pierre Guyotat, “L’autre scène,” Vivre (Paris: Denoël, 2003), 45. 50.Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2 , trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum), 76. 51.Alain Badiou “Guyotat, prince de la prose,” unpublished lecture (Paris: 21 October, 2005), n.p. 52.Ibid. 53.Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 109. 54.Ibid. 110-1. Lyotard formulates a position here parallel to Lacan’s analysis, which argues that the slave “can accept to work for the master and give up jouissance in the meantime.” (Jacques Lacan, Écrits , trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006, 259) This renunciation of jouissance founds the obsessive subject that I will discuss below, in an extension of the prostitutional logic developed by Lyotard. 55.Pierre Guyotat, “Langage du corps,” Vivre (Paris: Denoël, 2003), 24. Translation quoted from Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 139. 56.Lyotard, Libidinal Economy , 139. 57.Pierre Guyotat, Prostitution (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 90-1. In relation to his work we would also do well to recall the Lacanian dictum that “Punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning.” (Lacan, Écrits , 258) 58.Benjamin, “On Language As Such…,” 68. 59.Jacques Derrida, “ Geschlecht 1: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” trans. Ruben Bevezdivin and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Psyche, vol. 2 , eds Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8. 60.Anne Dufourmentelle, Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy , trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 56. 61.Ibid. 57. 62.Ibid., 101. 63.Avital Ronell, “The Stealth Pulse of Philosophy,” introduction to Anne Dufourmentelle, Blind Date: sex and philosophy , trans. Catherine Porter (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), xv. 64.Julia Kristeva, Le soleil noir: Dépression et mé?ancholie (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), 45. 65.Arist. DI 16b20. 66.Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2 , trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum), 545. 67.Avital Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire: Freud, And/Or, the Obsessional Neurotic Style (Maybe),” Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 108. Cf. also: “As mere reversal, this maintains the 'intervention' of which Lacan speaks in its classic column, still following the marching orders and route traced out by the commanding symbolicity of male homosexuality whose structures, in place since the time of Plato, continue to assure the paradigm of the transmission of knowledge.” (Ibid., p. 106) 68.“The anus can be said to mark a locus of privileged transaction between at least two gendered entities. It organizes a space from which rental agreements are negotiated, leases are taken out by one gender to permit the other gender provisionally—depending on the terms of the agreement—to occupy its space. The other of genital sexuality, determinable neither as masculine nor strictly speaking as feminine, anality nonetheless constitutes a sexuality, a shared space that is often vaginized.” (Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire,” 108) One could, and perhaps ought, to read Guyotat’s Prostitution , as exactly a constant negotiation of this sort, where language itself succumbs to this logic of “indefensible copulations.” (Ibid., 110) 69.Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire,” 110. 70.Arist. Cat . 1a12-15. 71.Cf. Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1962), 184, fn. 3. 72.See Rhet . 1357b26-30 and APr 69a13-16. 73.Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method , trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 19. 74.Lacan, Écrits , 415. A similar idea, originating from a different perspective, but with a similar foundation in Aristotle, can be found in the work of Paul de Man: “The convergence of sound and meaning […] is a rhetorical rather than aesthetic function of language, an identifiable trope (paronomasis) that operates on the level of the signifier.” (Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986, 10) 75.Lacan, Écrits , 756. 76.Ibid., 758. 77.“Psychiatry supposes in general an intimate relation between homosexuality and paranoia, but gives it often the following form: the homosexual frequently suffers from persecution paranoia.” (Guy Hocquenghem, Le désir homosexuel , Paris: Fayard, 2000, 32) 78.Ibid., 59. 79.Ronell, “The Sujet Suppositaire,” 117. 80.See Plat. Soph . 262c. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 171-179. Since 2007 there has been a great deal of interest in speculative realism, launched in the spring of that year at a well-attended workshop in London. It was always a loose arrangement of people who shared few explicit doctrines and no intellectual heroes except the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, an improbable patron saint for a school of metaphysics. Lovecraft serves as a sort of mascot for the “speculative” part of speculative realism, since his grotesque semi-Euclidean monsters (...) symbolize the rejection of everyday common sense to which speculative realism aspires. The “realism” part of speculative realism was aimed not at idealism, which few people openly defend today, but at what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism”: the view that philosophy cannot speak of human or world in isolation, but only of a primal correlation or rapport between the two.1 The goal of the speculative realists was to bring the things-in-themselves back into discussion, though there was ferocious disagreement amongst us as to how these things could be talked about: whether the things themselves remained inaccessible to direct access as in Kantian and Heideggerian philosophy, or whether they could be the object of direct mathematical insight as for Alain Badiou and his circle. This diversity of opinion led to an early break-up for the speculative realist movement, which quickly broke into numerous splinter groups bearing little resemblance to one another. In an earlier essay published in this journal,2 I discussed Meillassoux’s “speculative materialism”; a more detailed account can now be found in my recently published book on his philosophy.3 In this essay I will discuss the “object-oriented” branch of speculative realism, with which I have a more direct personal involvement as one of its founders. One of the primary differences between speculative materialism and object-oriented ontology (OOO) concerns the point just mentioned. Both schools are united in their resistance to the banal claims of continental philosophy to stand “beyond” the realism/anti-realism dispute (Husserl and Heidegger, unfortunately, must take the blame for such assertions). Yet there remains a question as to what extent reality can be known . Are the things-in-themselves directly accessible to humans or not? Simply put, the answer of speculative materialism is yes, while the answer of object-oriented ontology is no. The question can be restated as follows. We might summarize the philosophical position of Kant by saying that he makes two basic claims: 1. Human knowledge is finite, since the things-in-themselves can be thought but never known. 2. The human-world relation (mediated by space, time, and the categories) is philosophically privileged over every other sort of relation; philosophy is primarily about human access to the world, or at least must take this access as its starting point. Object-oriented philosophy agrees with the first Kantian point and disagrees with the second, while for speculative materialism it is precisely the reverse. For object-oriented philosophy, the things-in-themselves remain forever beyond our grasp, but not because of a specifically human failure to reach them. Instead, relations in general fail to gasp their relata, and in this sense the ghostly things-in-themselves haunt inanimate causal relations no less than the human-world relation, which no longer stands at the center of philosophy. For speculative materialism it is exactly the opposite. Here, humans remain at the center of philosophy, though their knowledge is no longer finite. Humans are capable of the absolute; any qualities that can be mathematized are primary qualities that can be known absolutely, with no dark residue lying behind them. And since this “absolute” exists even when we sleep or die, speculative materialism often claims to be a form of realism rather than a transcendental idealism. The present essay is confined to the internal challenges of the object-oriented approach, the one I prefer myself. 1. Objects In the beginning, philosophy was an anti -object-oriented enterprise. Normal human experience seems to confront a world broken into units: natural objects such as flowers, stars, and wild animals, artificial objects ranging from pirate ships to copper mines, and both the natural and artificial kinds ranging widely in size from tiny to gigantic. Despite our constant experience of objects in daily life, philosophy began in the pre-Socratic era as an effort to find a more basic reality lying beneath all these entities. For various pre-Socratics the world was made of immortal elements such as water or air, of four elements in combination mixed by love and hate, of atoms swerving in the void, or of a formless apeiron rumbling beneath all tangible things. No matter which of these is chosen as the foundation of the world, the familiar individual entities of the cosmos are not treated as fundamental. In this way all the flowers, stars, wild animals, pirate ships, and copper mines, not to mention the objects of religion and flat-out superstition, are undermined . They are treated as composite things built of something more fundamental; in the pre-Socratic period, it was simply a question of deciding what was the most fundamental element. Nor is this attitude confined to ancient pre-Socratic times, since we find the same thing even now: in the crude present-day materialism that holds objects to be nothing more than conglomerates of molecules, atoms, quarks and electrons, or strings; in philosophies of the so-called “pre-individual,” which treats the world as a semi-articulate lump arbitrarily carved into pieces by the human intellect; and in even more recent philosophies that treat the world as a mathematical structure that breaks into isolated “real patterns” only at different levels of observational scale.4 Let’s use the term “undermining” for those theories which think that objects are too shallow to be the truth. Here, the real action supposedly unfolds at a deeper layer than individual things, whether that of tiny elemental pieces or of a semi-liquid, holistic quasi-lump. But for those who wish to denigrate objects as the basic theme of philosophy, there is another way to do it. Rather than undermining objects by dissolving them downward into some component element, we can dissolve them upward or “overmine” them, to coin a new English term. Rather than viewing objects as too shallow to be the truth, we can treat them as too falsely deep to be the truth. This happens whenever a philosophy tells us that an object is nothing more than how it appears to the observer; or an arbitrary bundling of immediately perceived qualities; or when it tells us that there are only “events,” not underlying substances; or that objects are real only insofar as they perceive or affect other things. In all these cases, objects are treated as a useless hypothesis, a false depth lying beneath the immediate givens of consciousness or the concrete events of the world. As I have written elsewhere, it is also possible to combine overmining and undermining in a single philosophy. This happens most often in scientific materialism, which undermines when it finds tinier components from which our everyday objects are built, but overmines when it thinks these tiny pieces are nothing over and above their mathematizable properties. In short, a large part of present-day philosophy is devoted to contempt for individual objects, which it denounces as the gullible fantasies of common sense– or “folk psychology,” as it is arrogantly phrased by a number of scientistic hacks. The main counter-tradition to undermining and overmining is, of course, the Aristotelian tradition. Here individual entities are treated as the primary substance, which both undermining and overmining philosophies enjoy mocking as “mid-sized physical objects.” But it seems to me that the Aristotelian tradition is closer to the truth than the other two. Admittedly, there are numerous features of traditional substance that we might not wish to accept. Consider the philosophy of Leibniz, for instance. While Leibniz distinguishes between substance and aggregate, we do not have to agree with him that a mushroom is a substance but an army is not. While Leibniz holds that every substance is eternal, we can follow Aristotle’s brave decision and recognize destructible substances such as plants, insects, and humans, which he was the first in Ancient Greece to do. Nor is it necessary to agree with Leibniz that substances have no windows and do not affect one another directly (though in fact I do agree with Leibniz on this point, if not with the others). Anyhow, we can see that Aristotle, the Scholastics, and Leibniz, with their primary substances and substantial forms, make up an early object-oriented school surrounded on both sides by legions of underminers and overminers who reject individual entities as the basic stuff of the world. But I myself came to that tradition indirectly, through a less obvious but more contemporary tradition of object-oriented thought: phenomenology. Here I mean both Husserl and Heidegger, each of them making a different innovation in the philosophy of objects. We should speak briefly about these two different but deeply related currents. Like Brentano before him, Husserl is concerned with the sphere of intentionality, or “immanent objectivity.” Suspending all theories about an extra-phenomenal outside world, Husserl analyzes the phenomena as they appear to us, with attention to the subtlest contours of our dealings with phenomena such as blackbirds or mailboxes. There can be no question that Husserl is an idealist to the core—even in the Logical Investigations— for him it makes no sense to say that there could be realities not observable in principle by consciousness. Nonetheless, Husserl often feels like a realist. The atmosphere of his writings is one in which individual things seem opaque and resistant, not entirely exhausted by their appearance in the mind. By contrast, one rarely or never has this sense when reading someone like Hegel, at least not when it comes to individual entities. Despite the scholarly precision of his thinking, Husserl often seems puzzled by the many facets of concrete individual things, rather than merely overmining them and reducing them to their appearance in consciousness. This paradox must be considered briefly. Like Brentano, Husserl is focused on intentionality, which means: on objects lying before the mind. All perception, judgment, love, and hate is perception, judgment, love, or hate of some object . This object is never a concealed thing-in-itself lying beyond access, but purely immanent: intentionality means immanent objectivity. But in one of the most important passages of the Logical Investigations , Husserl takes a distance from Brentano when determining exactly what this means. Whereas Brentano views intentionality as a matter of “experienced contents,” for Husserl intentionality consists of “object-giving acts.” The difference may sound dry and technical, but I would call it Husserl’s most important contribution to philosophy. To say that our encounter with an apple consists of “experienced contents” is to say that we experience hundreds or thousands of qualities on a democratic plane, all of them pressed together into a single thing called an apple. The exact shape of the apple, its temperature in the hand, its degree of hardness, the exact profile it displays in this very moment, its precise momentary sweetness—all these are equally qualities of the apple as an experienced content. Husserl views the situation differently. For Husserl, the experience of an apple is an object-giving act quite apart from the list of qualities it now seems to possess. We can toss the apple in the air, view it from numerous angles, observe it in various degrees of sunlight, describe it in moods of euphoria and in crippling depression, but for us it remains the same apple in all these cases. To use Husserl’s famous technical term, there are countless “adumbrations” ( Abschattungen ) of the apple. The apple itself is not obtained by adding up all the different surfaces and profiles it can display; rather, the apple is there from the start as an enduring unit that exhibits numerous different facets at different times. Against all the empiricist theories, Husserl establishes a permanent rift between intentional objects and the various intentional qualities they might have at any given time. In the realm of conscious experience, objects are not “bundles of qualities,” but units lying deeper than any display of surface qualities. In short, there is a permanent tension in the sphere of intentional experience between objects and their qualities. It seems to me that this is why Husserl feels like a realist: for him, intentional objects are not just bundles of qualities lying before the mind, but places of fracture where an object grinds up against its own qualities, displaying different qualities at different times even while remaining distinct from them. As far as I am aware, this is also something completely new in the history of philosophy. It is true that Husserl cuts off the real world, collapsing everything into an immanent phenomenal sphere. But precisely in so doing, he is able to discover a previously unknown drama within the intentional sphere, which is broken up into objects with constantly shifting faces. Instead of calling them intentional objects, I prefer to call them “sensual” objects for at least two reasons. For one thing, the phrase “intentional objects” is dry and technical, unpleasant to repeat as frequently as it needs to be when we discuss such topics. But more importantly, the word “intentional” is used ambiguously; many philosophers use it to refer to the object lying outside the mental sphere, a distant object at which our thoughts “point.” But that is not what Brentano and Husserl mean when they speak of intentionality, and thus the phrase “intentional object” often leads to confusion. For this reason, we can speak instead of a permanent tension between sensual objects and sensual qualities, or between an apple that remains the same apple from one moment to the next, and the wildly fluctuating kaleidoscope of its surface features. Here we can see how the strife between object and quality unfolds in the purely sensual arena described by phenomenology. And this brings us to Heidegger. If Husserl turns philosophy into a description of how things appear in consciousness, we know that for Heidegger our primary mode of dealing with things is not through their appearing to consciousness. The place where Heidegger breaks with Husserl is the famous tool-analysis published in Being and Time , but first presented to his Freiburg students eight years earlier, in 1919. A brief summary will be enough for our purposes here. What is key for Heidegger is that insofar as something is present to consciousness, it is merely present-at-hand ( vorhanden ). But what is present to our minds in this way is only a tiny proportion of the entities with which we are involved. The air we breathe, the floor on which we stand, the heart, kidneys, and lungs that function within us, all tend not to be present insofar as they are doing their work. As every reader of Heidegger knows, it is usually broken equipment that comes to conscious attention. Equipment in its seamless functioning is ready-to-hand rather than present-at-hand, zuhanden rather than vorhanden . A few additional points need to be made. In the first place, the tool-analysis is not limited to a specific kind of entity called “tools” in the narrow sense, which would include hammers, drills, cars, guns, and computers, while excluding family, friends, house pets, and God. Instead, every entity has both sides: ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. This is not because we “use” our family and friends in the same way that we exploit hammers and drills, but because our friends no less than our tools are deeper than any possible access we might have to them. The hammer-in-itself is not the same as our perception of it at any given moment. But the same holds for people, and just as much for the cryptic, concealed God who communicates only by signs. In the second place, we need to avoid the frequent reading of the tool-analysis as equivalent to a distinction between praxis and theory, as if Heidegger were merely telling us that all perception of hammers and theories about hammers were grounded in a pre-theoretical use of them. The problem with this interpretation is clear enough: for if tools are always deeper than our perceptions or theories of them, they are also deeper than our use of them. To sit in a chair is no closer a relation to the chair than thinking about it is; in both cases, the chair itself retains an unexhausted surplus deeper than our relation with it. It is not a difference between theory and praxis, but a difference between the things themselves and our relations with them. But there is one more step to the argument, one that Heidegger never considered. The failure of both theory and praxis to exhaust the things of the world is not some tragic mental feature of humans and a few smart animals. Instead, it is a limitation of relationality in general. Objects withdraw from each other in the case of inanimate causation no less than in the human use of tools. Rain striking a tin roof does not make intimate contact with the reality of the tin any more than the monkeys on the roof or the impoverished resident of the tin-roofed shack are able to do. Let it simply be added that the withdrawal of objects from one another in causal relations turns causality into a serious philosophical problem. For if objects cannot touch directly, then how do they influence one another at all? There must be some third term, some medium through which they interact. Causation must be indirect or vicarious rather than direct and immediate. The final point to be made is that Heidegger’s withdrawn, sub-phenomenal world of tool-beings must be made up of individual things. This apparently runs counter to the spirit of Being and Time , where all tools seem to melt together into a single system: “there is no such thing as ‘an’ equipment,”5 as Heidegger puts it. This even seems true in his later writings on “the thing,” where the concealed portion of individual entities is called “earth,” and the earth is generally treated as a monolithic lump rather than a set of fully articulated individuals.6 It might seem as though the subterranean world of being were a rumbling, unified chunk broken into pieces only by human consciousness, a conclusion drawn by Emmanuel Levinas during his ardently Heideggerian phase in the 1940’s.7 But this is impossible. Hammers break in different ways from drills, which break in different ways from hearts, kidneys, and lungs. The shocks and surprises generated by failing equipment are not random. The world is not a single lump broken into pieces by consciousness, but consists of individual pieces from the start. To summarize, we can definitely say that for Heidegger there is a real sub-phenomenal world in a way that is not true for Husserl. By pushing Heidegger a bit beyond what he wanted to say, we can also conclude that this real world is made up of individual objects that are withdrawn from all theoretical, practical, and even causal access. And furthermore, each of these real objects must have specific real qualities. For as Leibniz observed,8 even the simple unified monads must have diverse qualities: otherwise they would be interchangeable, with hammers equally able to function as drills, kidneys, dolphins, or monkeys depending on the whim of the observer. But this is ridiculous. When considering Husserl, we found that the sensual realm was broken into both objects and qualities. By pushing Heidegger’s tool-analysis just slightly, we find an analogous distinction between real objects and their real qualities. We thus have a world made of four terms: real objects, real qualities, sensual objects, sensual qualities. I have often made the case that this is what Heidegger was aiming at with his mysterious theory of das Geviert (“the fourfold”) and will not repeat that case here. What is more important is that we now have a model to play with that points to a number of puzzles and to possible gaps in our understanding, much like any scientific model. Let’s draw a few more conclusions from this idea before getting into some of the trickier questions it raises. 2. The Fourfold and Vicarious Causation At first the model seems to consist of four terms linked by just two tensions. Within the confines of experience, there is a strife between sensual objects and their shifting sensual qualities, precisely as described by Husserl. Even if I sit motionless before a bowl of pears and apples, these objects vary in profile depending on the angle and distance at which I sit, and vary in color depending on the increase or decrease of afternoon shadow in the room, or the lamplight and candles in which they are viewed after nightfall; their imagined tastiness alters as my mood and appetite alter. This is true all the more if I actively stand and maneuver through the room to view them from dramatically different vantage points, and they vary all the more for living species of different size and capacity, whether it be fruit flies or even monkeys. But within certain limits, these shifting features and contours and possibilities of objects do not turn them into different objects. If we consider that they are merely caricatures, exaggerated versions of real pears and apples, then we allude to a dark subterranean underworld of beings that no perception and no relation can ever touch. This underworld, too, is made of objects, but objects that exceed any attempt to grasp them. Since we deduce that they must be individuals rather than a single inarticulate or semi-articulate lump (for otherwise, hammers and pears would not be able to surprise us in specifically hammer-fashion and pear-manner), these real objects must have qualities as well. But for the very same reason, there cannot be a total disconnection between these two realms. The real must be able to affect the sensual, to surge up into the visual realm when tools break or by other means. There must be various crossovers between these two kingdoms—some relation between real objects and sensual qualities, and also between sensual objects and real qualities. When speaking of Husserl, we have so far referred only to a strife found only within the sensual realm. A sensual object has countless adumbrations, countless sensual qualities, depending on the manner in which it is observed. But Husserl already knows that there is more going on than this. A pear, apple, or hammer not only bathes in a shifting flux of qualities that portray it according to different adumbrations. There are also truly important qualities that these objects must have in order to remain what they are for us. Through the method of eidetic variation, we strip away the noise and confetti of the accidental profiles of a thing, and move toward some sense of what the thing really needs in order to be what it is in the sensual realm. True, Husserl thinks we can determine what these important properties are through a kind of direct intellectual or essential intuition, but we need not follow him on this point. Instead, we need only agree that there is a distinction between the wild masquerade of a thing’s surface appearance and the deeper, enduring apple-qualities that the apple must retain for as long as we acknowledge it to be this very apple. In this way we are led to see that the sensual object crosses into the underworld through its possession of real qualities as well. They are real because they withdraw from direct access no less than efficient hammers or unnoticed lungs and kidneys do. In short, Husserl’s intentional objects, which we can rename “sensual objects” for the reasons mentioned earlier, are a remarkable crossroads where both sensual and real qualities belong to the same sensual object, as if the same planet had both visible and concealed moons. We now have a third tension in our model, and the kingdoms of real and sensual are now linked by a strange sort of bridge, crossing between shadow and light: a rigorous scientific phenomenology generating the sort of strange communicational infrastructure between real and unreal that might be found in a fairy tale. We should also ask about another unusual crossing, the one between real objects and sensual qualities. And here we are in luck, since Heidegger’s tool-analysis already points the way. When the hammer shatters in our hand or the floor collapses beneath our feet, we experience a kind of shock. These tool-beings no longer function invisibly or simply withdraw unnoticed into shadow. Instead, numerous features of the hammer now erupt explicitly into view. But contrary to some readings of Heidegger, the hammer-object itself never does so. The real hammer remains just as distant as ever before, even when it is “broken.” Yet we are able to get a strange indirect sense of it anyway: our minds do not encounter it directly, but allude to it, or see the hammer without seeing it. The sensual qualities of the hammer no longer just swirl around the phenomenal hammer in the mind, but seem to be enslaved to a dark and hidden object that forever eludes our grasp despite its apparently obtrusive malfunction. And here we have the fourth tension in the model, one between real objects and sensual qualities. There is no need here for a detailed discussion of Heidegger’s fourfold, which is analogous but not identical to the quadruple structure presented here. Although I have argued elsewhere that his earth, sky, gods, and mortals have some analogy to the fourfold of real objects, real qualities, sensual objects, and sensual qualities—and have argued further that Heidegger was on the scent of this model as early as 1919—what is really of interest are the four just-described tensions between the four poles, which he notices but never names. He speaks of the interrelations between the four solely in poetic terms as mirrors, dances, weddings, and songs. But we are now in a position to give them more familiar names. Few topics are of greater philosophical interest than time and space. Daydreaming children dig for paradoxes here, as do Nobel Prize winners and the criminally insane. But one common assumption among all these groups seems to be that time and space are peerless queens, or special dimensions of the cosmos devoid of any rivals. Kant sequesters them in the Transcendental Aesthetic, on a different footing from the categories of the understanding. But the polarized model of objects and qualities allows us to integrate time and space into a wider theory in which they are just two dimensions of the world among others. According to the object-oriented model only the present exists: only objects with their qualities, locked into whatever their duels of the moment might be. In that sense, time seems to be illusory, though not for the usual reason that time is just a fourth spatial dimension always already present from the start. Instead, time does not exist simply because only the present ever exists. Nonetheless, time as a lived experience cannot be denied. We do not encounter a static frame of reality, but seem to feel a passage of time. It is not a pure chaos shifting wildly from one second to the next, since there is change within apparent endurance. Sensual objects endure despite swirling oscillations in their surface adumbrations, and this is precisely what is meant by the experience of time . Time can be defined as the tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities. Turning to space, one thing we know is that space cannot be located entirely within the sensual realm. John Locke noted that our experience of space is in some way an illusion. Everything in experience itself is flat and equidistant, as seen from the fact that babies reach with equal confidence for nearby toys, distant doorways, and the moon. Space is not directly accessible to our senses, but inferred, and this skill must be acquired at a specific point in child development. Despite what Leibniz claims, space is not the realm of relation, but of both relation and non-relation. There would be no space if everything were pressed directly up against us. Space means that there is something at a distance from us, or withheld from us. But this is precisely what Heidegger gives us in the tool-analysis. The hammer seems to be an entirely domestic creature of our experience, until it breaks, and then we recognize that there is a hammer-thing at some distance from us, not entirely a creature of our experience. Space can be defined as the tension between real objects and sensual qualities. Perhaps it is now clear where we are going. Two tensions still remain, and though they are less often the topic of romantic speculation than are time and space, they belong on the same footing in the model and hence deserve to be mentioned in the same breath. In Husserl we found a third tension between sensual objects and their real qualities. Better yet, he already names it for us: eidos . Eidos is the tension between a sensual object in experience and the withdrawn pivotal features that we can only hint at rather than confronting directly. And finally, we should not forget the fourth tension, the only one that has nothing to do with sensual experience at all: the tension between real objects and real qualities, which we can simply deduce and never experience at all. For this unity and duality in the heart of real things, the traditional name is essence , and there is no problem with using it here. Essence is the tension between a real thing and its real qualities. Once the terms are defined in this way, the world can be viewed as the composite drama of time, space, essence, and eidos, so that the object-oriented model of the world is further enriched. And in fact, there are more than just these four. We also need to consider the relations between real and sensual objects, and between real and sensual qualities, as well as the relations between each of the four poles and another of its own kind. That yields ten terms rather than four, but there is no point developing the other six here. For those who are interested, they are classified in my book The Quadruple Object .9 For now we can leave open the question as to whether the coincidence of this number ten with that of Aristotle’s ten categories is significant or not. Before moving to the conclusion, we can add three more interrelated ideas to the mix. It was clear from the start that if real objects withdraw from one another, they cannot affect one another directly. Between real objects, only indirect or vicarious causation is possible. There must be an intermediary between any two real objects, and two points are evident here. First, this intermediary cannot itself be a real object, or there would simply be an endless process in which the intermediary would need further intermediaries between itself and the other objects, with the result that nothing would ever succeed in touching anything else. In fact, this is the very criticism I made in Prince of Networks of the model of indirect causation offered by Latour in Pandora’s Hope , in which actors can touch only by means of an intermediate actor, but since all actors are of the exact same type for Latour, none of them is truly capable of linking with anything else. Second, the intermediary must be capable of making direct contact with both of the other terms. Now, there is only one place where that can happen, and that is the interior of an object. This idea also comes from Husserl, though he never draws the needed radical conclusions from it. Namely, Husserl points out the paradox that intentionality is both one and two. On the one hand, in intentionality there is I myself and then there is the pine tree, not fusing together into a single lump, since the very fact that I am perceiving it proves otherwise. But on the other hand, the intentional relation between me and the pine tree must certainly be one, since we are joined together in the perception rather than being painfully and eternally separated. Given that perceptions are generally held to occur inside the mind, the easy conclusion would be that I and the sensual pine tree meet inside the mind. Husserl implies this point, and it is stated quite openly in the altogether different (and completely overrated) system of the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger. The problem with this notion is that I myself cannot be simultaneously the whole of the relation and merely half of it. The sensual object and I cannot meet inside of me. Instead, our encounter occurs on the interior of the relation between me and the real tree (which must be indirect, but there is no need to complicate things here). When the tree and I somehow form a link, we become a new object; every relation forms a new real object. This idea will be resisted for the simple reason that we normally think of “objects” as solid physical things that hold together firmly, whereas something like the relation between me and the tree seems much too flimsy and transient. But remember, the definition of a real object is simply a unified thing with specific qualities that withdraws from any attempt to grasp it. The relation between me and the tree certainly meets these criteria: the intentional relation must be one, or it could not occur; it must have specific qualities, or it would be interchangeable with any other relation; and it withdraws from any attempt to grasp it, since I can never exhaustively grasp my own relation with the tree, and a fortiori the tree can never do so. So, what we have is the contact between me and the sensual tree on the interior of the relation between me and the real one. The same could be true in reverse, assuming the tree can perceive me in some fashion, but this would be a different and parallel relation in which the real tree encountered a sensual caricature of me. This may sound like a mere panpsychist amusement as long as a tree is one of the two terms. But consider a relation between two people, and the insight suddenly becomes much more threatening. A relation between friends or lovers then splits into two simultaneous but asymmetrical relations in which each person deals with the other as if with a ghost. In any case, we should add that this contact between a real object and a sensual one, on the interior of a third object, is precisely the sort of direct contact we are looking for. For contrary to some readings of Husserl, intentional objects never “hide.” If I see an apple from one specific angle, the apple is not “hidden” behind that current profile such that we would have to run hysterically through all possible angles, distances, and lighting conditions in order to add up all the profiles to amass one apple. Instead, the apple is there from the start, from the mere fact that I recognize it, and is simply covered over with fleeting qualities like cheap jewelry or encrustations of brine. Finally, we need to reject the idea that all objects must be in relation with other objects at any given time. Although all objects are made up of relations between component objects, it is not necessarily the case that all objects enter into larger components in turn. While it may be the case that there is an infinite regress of entities downward into the depths of the world, it is not the case that there is an infinite progress upward. There may be countless real entities that exist (since their components have already formed them) which have not yet managed to have an effect on anything else in the world. These can be called sleeping objects, or dormant objects. They exist, but currently affect nothing. Perhaps there are millions of entities that remain in this state forever, passing through the world with the purely unlucky fate of never affecting or being affected by anything else at all. 3. Some Paradoxes But right now I would like to consider the reverse case, that there may be things that do have an effect on other things but without being real. There is a relevant term here that has reversed its meaning over time: “flat ontology.” When the phrase “flat ontology” was used by Roy Bhaskar in the early 1970’s in his book on the realist theory of science, it was a polemical term. Namely, he used it to refer to theories that flatten the world into its accessibility to human observers; it was a dismissive phrase aimed at positivism, not a flattering description of realism. The meaning of the phrase was reversed in 2006 by Bhaskar’s admirer Manuel DeLanda. For DeLanda, “flat ontology” simply means that all entities must be treated alike. That it to say, it is an anti -reductionist term, such that armies, cities, and herds of cattle might be just as real as steel girders and atoms of potassium. “Flat” has now reversed its meaning: rather than referring to a world without levels in which everything inhabits the realm of human consciousness, it means instead a world in which all levels are on the same playing field. There can be no better example of a perfectly flat ontology than the early philosophy of Bruno Latour. At that point in Latour’s career, all human and inhuman things, all chunks of physical matter and people and cartoon characters, are equally actors . What makes all things actors, despite the vast differences between them, is that they have an effect on other things. As Latour puts it as recently as 1999 in Pandora’s Hope , to be real means “to modify, transform, perturb, or create” something else. Reality is defined not by what it is, but by what it does. Not everything is equally strong , since the Chinese government affects more things than does a stick figure drawn in the notebook of a Chinese schoolboy, but everything is equally real , since even that stick figure has some faint emotional resonance in the boy’s mind and is therefore not just an empty hole of non-being, while the mighty effect of the Chinese government on its citizens is different only in degree from the stick figure, even if that degree of difference is huge. Reality for the early Latour means having an effect on other things. And just as for Aristotle all humans are equally humans and all trees equally trees, for the early Latour all actors are equally actors. But I just finished claiming that there are objects called dormant objects that affect nothing, not now and perhaps not ever, depending on how things unfold. The question I want to address briefly as this essay comes to a conclusion is whether the reverse is also true: are there things that have an effect despite not being real? And here is where I have been in disagreement with another philosopher friend, Levi Bryant of the Larval Subjects blog.10 For Bryant, anything that has an effect of any sort is real, and given that Chinese stick figures, Popeye, and the monsters of H.P. Lovecraft all have some greater or lesser effect on someone’s moods or the sales of some cinema or bookstore, all are real as well. This apparent reality of all fictional characters has led some to accuse Bryant of defending an absurdly inflationary universe, in which all actual and possible things are real. For Bryant and the early Latour, then, reality and efficacy are interchangeable terms. And given that lots of different things can have an effect, this seems to balloon the scope of reality to an absurd degree. What I want to suggest here is that just as not all real things have an effect (at least not in any given moment), not all effective things are real. Unlike Bryant and the early Latour, this puts me automatically in the good graces of Ockham’s Razor, given that I can multiply merely sensual objects as much as I please and let them have as many effects as possible without ever saying that they are “real,” that they have autonomous existence outside their presence in the experience of some other entity. Stated differently, I do not advocate a purely flat ontology. Certainly I would agree with Bryant and DeLanda that there are real entities at all levels of scale; I am completely in accord with their anti-reductionist platform. But I do not agree further with Bryant that just because something in the mind is having an effect on me, that it is therefore real. At first this might seem to place me in the same camp as what might be called the epistemological wing of speculative realism. For such people it is ridiculous to think that entities such as Popeye are real, and equally ridiculous to believe in many other things experienced by everyday common sense. Their goal is to destroy what they call the “manifest image” in favor of the true scientific image of things. Epistemology here means a way to debunk gullible Christians, alchemists, and Latourians, and make the world safe for science. In their darkly clouded eyes, while Bryant wants to say that all images are real, they want to insist that some are real and some are false. However, I have nothing to do with this position, for the simple reason that I think all images are false . And this is what makes my position more in keeping with Ockham’s Razor, since it is only this position that never confuses the sensual with the real, while the epistemological wing of speculative realism grants reality to countless objects that are really nothing more than images, even if we agree to call them “scientific” ones. For me nothing sensual is ever real, no matter how many effects it might have. Here is another way to put it. We can talk about the sensual trees, chairs, cartoon characters, and hallucinated unicorns that might populate human experience. The question is sometimes asked how we know which of these sensual objects correspond to things in the real world and which do not; “criteria” are then demanded for sorting the wheat from the chaff, so that we might praise our images of quarks as truly corresponding to something real while ridiculing or exterminating our manifest folk images of Popeye and unicorns. Yet the problem must be reframed. None of our images “correspond” to anything at all; none of them bear any isomorphic resemblance to the real objects that withdraw into darkness. All are fictions. Or to put it in Latourian terms, all are translations . We can see this by considering that no matter how excellent our scientific concept of a tree may be, this concept is not itself a tree : the concept of the tree may grow every summer just as a tree does, but it neither sheds leaves nor bears fruit. Whenever I raise this complaint, it is objected that it is a “straw man,” since no one really believes that a real tree and its image are the same thing. In response I say that of course no says this, because it is too ridiculous to maintain for an instant. Nonetheless, this ridiculous doctrine is directly entailed by the theory that the image of Popeye does not correspond to anything but the image of a tree does correspond. All they might be able to add is that while the image of a tree is simply a form or structure, the real tree is that same form or structure stamped in physical matter. But this would give us nothing but a dubious traditional metaphysics of form and matter, its banality barely concealed by the table-pounding aggressions of hack scientism. The truth, I believe, is that no sensual objects “correspond” to real ones, just as no translations of Shakespeare into French or Dutch “correspond” to the English text. Not all translations are equal– there are better and worse translations of Shakespeare, just as there are better and worse meals with which to catch the flavor of certain wines, and better and worse ways (in Latour’s best example) to refine crude oil into gasoline for your car’s tank, which by no means implies that the gasoline is a “copy” of the crude oil. This is not relativism, but rather the most hardcore possible realism . It is not relativism, because there really are better and worse translations; it is hardcore realism because it takes real objects so seriously that it holds them to be irreplaceable by any conceptual model—no model of a banana or apple, however detailed, can step into the world and become a banana or apple. In short, I join Bryant wholeheartedly in rejecting this cop’s-fantasy epistemological project of distinguishing between bad commonsense images and good scientific ones, which would reduce the greatness of philosophy to a series of small-time drug busts. But that said, what about Bryant’s further claim that fictions are real? As I see it, the problem needs to be reframed. Granted that all real objects can be converted into translations, the question is this: when can translations retroactively affect the real? It cannot be denied that this happens regularly. Our sensual experience of a room may displease us, and this leads us to rearrange the furniture, thereby causing shifts among real objects. The insufficient sweetness of strawberries may lead to genetic work that alters those very strawberries. A fictional character can provoke genuine suicides, as famously happened with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther . Some loose political ideas in the heads of a dozen Egyptian protestors might turn into a real Constitution that affects millions of people for generations. Even an object with as flimsy a claim to reality as Popeye or unicorns can have retroactive effects on the real by making huge contributions to the toy and video game industries. From considering the eidos in Husserl’s phenomenology, the strange fact emerged that sensual objects always have real qualities. Simply by dreaming up any random monster, we have not automatically generated a real object, but we have generated real qualities. Why real qualities? Because even though no unicorn or dragon is automatically real just because it is in my mind and affects my moods, it does automatically have real qualities . We can never say exactly what the crucial features are of the fictions in my mind that make up the eidos of any one of them; those features are withdrawn from direct access and exceed any possible analysis or interpretation of them. And that is what makes them real, even though they belong to an unreal thing—a mere sensual object. The question is under what conditions the real qualities of an unreal thing can be split up and rearranged into real objects, so that in this way the fictional objects of our mind can cross the bridge toward the real. As I have said, it happens all the time, and at other times it fails. It is merely the way in which it happens or fails to happen that remains a puzzle. NOTES 1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: Essay on the Necessity of Contingency , trans. R. Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) 2 Graham Harman, “ Meillassoux’s Virtual Future ,” continent. , 1.2 (2011), pp. 78-91. 3 Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.) 4 See also Graham Harman, “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , Vol. 28, No. 5, 2010. Pages 772-790. 5 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962.) Page 97. 6 See Martin Heidegger, “Einblick in das was ist,” in Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge . (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994.) 7 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents , trans. A. Lingis. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988.) 8 G.W. Leibniz, “Monadology.” In Philosophical Essays , trans. R. Ariew & D. Garber. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989.) 9 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object . (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011.) 10 See for example the following post at Bryant’s popular Larval Subjects blog. (shrink)

Legal translation is viewed as “a category in its own right” (Weston in An English reader’s guide to the French legal system. Berg, Oxford, (1991, p. 2). It is a kind of translation of the language used for specific purposes (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:28, 2000). Legal translation requires accuracy in relaying the substance of the message, while respecting the form thereof as well as the genius of the target language (Zhao in J Transl Stud 4:19, 2000; Sarcevic in (...) New approach to legal translation. Kluwer Law International, Hague, 1997, p. 52). As generally accepted worldwide, precision is deemed of paramount importance in legal translation. With this in mind, the present paper deals chiefly with the concept of how legal translation can correctly be tested in order to ensure precision and validity for application and implementation. The paper will argue that the main goal of legal translation and the major criterion against which the precision of legal translation should be tested is to reproduce the same legal effect in the target text as that conveyed in the source text regardless of the method(s) used in the translation process. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

In November 2010, the Library of the Peace Palace in The Hague acquired a copy of Hugo Grotius’s seminal study on the law of war, De iure belli ac pacis (Paris: Nicolas Buon, 1625). The purchase represents the very rare first state (issue or printing) of the first edition, item no. 565-I in the well-known bibliography of Grotius’s works by Jacob Ter Meulen and P.J.J. Diermanse. This article is an adapted version of a speech held in the Peace Palace (...) on 21 February 2011, when the copy of De iure belli ac pacis was presented to the public. After a short survey of the genesis, printing history and early reception, the article goes into the differences between the three states of the first edition and their significance for the interpretation of Grotius’s work. A provisional checklist of copies in public libraries is added in an appendix. (shrink)